Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and a major holder of ether (ETH), has sparked heated debate in the crypto community by suggesting a possible rollback of the Ethereum network to mitigate losses at the Bybit exchange, which suffered a theft worth nearly $1.4 billion in ETH. In a social media post, Hayes directly questioned Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, about the feasibility of such a move: “@VitalikButerin, will you advocate rolling back the chain to help @Bybit_Official?”
the @vitalikbuter
will you advocate to roll back the chain to help
@Bybit_Official
?
– Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes)
February 21, 2025
Hayes justified his proposal by recalling a precedent from the network itself: “My own view as a mega $ETH holder is that $ETH stopped being money in 2016 after the DAO hardfork hack. If the community wanted to do that again, I would support it because we already voted no on immutability in 2016. Why not do it again?” Despite his controversial position, Buterin did not respond by the time this article was published.
The idea raised a critical point about the viability of a rollback in the current complexity of the Ethereum network. Gautham Santhosh, co-founder of Polynomial.fi, commented on the difficulties of a rollback: “I wish we could rollback the Bybit hack, I’m not against the idea. But the DAO hack was 15% of ETH with a clean recovery path. A rollback today would break bridges, stablecoins, L2s, RWAs, and more. The ETH ecosystem is too interconnected now for a clean solution like in 2016.”
A “rollback” involves reverting the blockchain to a previous state to undo malicious transactions and recover funds. Such a measure, while technically possible, requires consensus among network participants and raises profound questions about the immutability and security of data on the blockchain.
This isn’t the first time the crypto community has faced such dilemmas. In 2016, following the theft of $60 million worth of ETH from The DAO, the Ethereum network forked to reverse the heist, resulting in the creation of Ethereum Classic. More recently, the Bitcoin community rejected similar rollback proposals following a 2019 Binance theft, underscoring the importance of decentralization and immutability.
Hayes’ proposal has reignited the debate over the flexibility and security of cryptocurrency networks, especially in a context where large sums of money are at stake. The Bybit hack came to light after on-chain detective ZachXBT identified suspicious activity, with North Korean group Lazarus being blamed for the breach.
Amid these controversies, Bybit CEO Ben Zhou assured the exchange’s solvency despite the losses: “The hacker took control of the specific ETH cold wallet and transferred all ETH from the cold wallet to this unidentified address.”